Every year I travel with my family to Big White for skiing and even some evening time hockey in the open air. Almost all of the cabins and apartments are on the hill, so that it is truly a “ski in ski out” resort.

We have been doing this for almost 10 years, and now my oldest granddaughter, Annie is 15. She is interested in photography. Here are some pictures she took. I hope you enjoy them.

Students take 14 years to pay back their student loans according to this Financial Post article, and that is after the tax-payer has paid for the larget part of the tuition fees. How efficient are universities at delivering their knowledge? If students were given the opportunity to acquire their degree by being tested on what they knew and could do, and if they were encouraged to acquire their knowledge wherever and however they wanted, how many would choose to take on 14 years of debt? I would certainly explore other ways of acquiring the necessary knowledge.

Here is a fuzzy photo of our old timers’ hockey gang at our Christmas lunch, after our last game of the year. See if you can find me.

All appearances to the contrary, we had only one beer each to stay below the 0.5 % alcohol limit. One of our members had only cranberry juice. He will be volunteering as a designated driver in the Operation Red Nose campaign. He drives people home from parties, and the donations he receives go to charity. I was impressed with his community spirit. Maybe I will do this next year.

The number of words we know is the best indicator of language and literacy skills, in my view. This belief is at the core of the LingQ system. It turns out I am not the only person who thinks so. Check out The Word Brain.

The number of words we know is also the best predictor of success in society. Between 20 to 40% of people in most modern societies have poor or somewhat poor literacy skills,and this essentially means poor word knowledge. Functional illiteracy is even higher in the US than in most other OECD countries, and is closely related to the chance of someone ending up unemployed or in jail.

But outright functional illiteracy is not the whole story, since most people would improve their professional opportunities by improving their word power. In a modern sociey, word power is the key to money, status and prestige. Not always, not in every case, but in most cases.

According to this study, things are getting worse, not better, despite massive increases in public education funding over the last 30 years.

This does not mean that people with poor vocabularies cannot do well, but the odds are against them. I would love to see LingQ contribute to helping people in our society who struggle with reading and literacy, and therefore cannot fulfill their potential. I have tried to offer it free to the existing “not for profit” literacy “industry” and have always been rebuffed without any comments on whether LingQ might help some people.

LingQ emphasizes listening as an aid to reading, offers a range of integrated vocabulary acquisition tools, and statiscally tracks vocabulary growth. Surely it could help some people, even if it is only a minority.

Yet the established literacy sector, just holds its collective nose and disdains to even consider LingQ. This despite the fact that the number of learners who need to improve their word power is enormous, and constantly growing despite the efforts of existing programs. The numbers of people needing to improve their word power is well beyond the ability of existing programs to serve.